When comparing Photoshop vs Pyxel Edit, the Slant community recommends Pyxel Edit for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art / sprite editors?”Pyxel Edit is ranked 4th while Photoshop is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Pyxel Edit is:

Pros

Pro

Industry standard

Photoshop is used by professionals everywhere in a wide variety of fields including photography, graphic design and digital art. It is the de facto standard for image manipulation. If you've seen a magazine ad featuring a model, you've probably seen the effects of Photoshop. You won't be alone when using Photoshop.

Pro

Trove of plugins that extend functionality are available

A wide variety of plugins that add new effects, improve existing functionality and simplify workflow are available.

Pro

Lots of tutorials

There's a huge number of both free and paid tutorials available online. Websites like Lynda.com offer premium high-quality, in-depth tutorials, but there are plenty of free alternatives to be found on YouTube, blogs and specialized sites on the Internet.

Pro

Includes powerful content-aware tools

Photoshop includes content-aware tools such as content-aware fill that can fill in a select area based on what surrounds it.

Pro

Packs a staggering amount of functionality

Photoshop is the most fully featured image editing software available today allowing you to perform highly advanced image manipulation.

It has tools for RAW image adjustments, lens correction, retouching, image stitching, HDR, fixing framing. It supports most professional color modes and file formats. It includes extensive lists of filters, styles, effects, fonts as well as tools for painting, sketching and typography work. It understands both raster and vector graphics. It even includes tools for video editing, working with 3D objects and support for 3D printing.

Pro

Creative Cloud Photography subscription includes Lightroom

Lightroom is another image editing software from Adobe that's specifically designed for photo editing and managing of large quantities of digital images.

Pro

A cheaper, standalone version called Photoshop Elements is available

A stripped down version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Elements can be bought as a standalone application for $100.

Pro

Integrates with Creative Cloud

You can save all projects directly to the Creative Cloud allowing you to access them from any device and with any relevant Adobe software.

Pro

Mobile companion apps available

Pro

Intuitive UI

Pro

Supports animations

Tiles can be animated within Pyxel Edit, with "onion skin" frame overlays to assist in making smooth frame transitions.

Pro

Tileset extraction

Given an image and specified tile dimensions, Pyxel Edit will extract a tileset with no duplicate tiles. This mostly works for flat images though. If you feed Pyxel "finished maps" you will still get a lot of duplicates.

Pro

Tilemap serialization support

Tile-based images (maps) built in Pyxel Edit can be serialized via XML or JSON for easy import elsewhere.

Pro

Cheap compared to others

For only $9 (£6), this is one of the cheapest but also one of the best pixel editors out there.

Pro

Live tile-update

Instantly see if your tiles are tileable and/or seamless and fix it easily.

Pro

Indexed tiles can be used for reusing objects in animations

Cons

Con

Expensive

The standalone version of Photoshop costs $19.99/month, though it can be leased as part of the Creative Cloud Photography bundle that includes Lightroom for $9.99/month.

Con

Latest versions of Photoshop are subscription-only

While you can still buy CS6 from 2012 without needing a subscription by contacting Adobe support or the cut-down Photoshop Elements, any full-version version of Photoshop past CS6 requires a subscription.

Con

Learning it can take some time

While you can relatively quickly learn how to perform a few basic image editing tasks, understanding Photoshop's ins and outs can be difficult. It's partially due to the sheer amount of functionality that Photoshop packs (and understanding that some of the advanced functionality can take a while to understand on its own), and partially due to it being aimed at professionals with little hand-holding for novice users.

Con

Batch editing of images is not straightforward

Photoshop is designed to work extensively on one image at a time and while batch editing support exists, it's not that intuitive to use.

Con

Asset management capabilities are lacking

In Photoshop asset management is done through a separate program called Bridge. As Bridge is supposed to be a file management tool for not just Photoshop's files, but for files generated by all of Adobe's applications it covers a breadth of capabilities, but not depth.

Con

No Linux version

There is no Linux version of the editor.

Con

Free version lacks features

The free version of Pyxel Edit is an outdated beta. It does not receive updates.

Con

Mac version is dependent on Adobe Air

The OSX version of the application requires Adobe Air to run.

Con

Lacks some tools

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